The material which we're covering in this prep course is interesting material, very interesting material. It is a great oddity that man would be liable to so much in the way of quirk or oddity. The fact of his overt actmotivator opinions, the actual attempt on the part of the body to achieve, evidently, as many motivators as possible, the attitude of puzzlement on the part of a thetan, wondering just why this body doesn't get along so well, how the thetan has been rather blanked out concerning the actual attitude of the body, makes a picture of complexity, if not perplexity.

Here we have people trying to get a job done, trying to get around and straighten up things and live a good life, and all that sort of thing, and they're using a robot which is obsessed. The human body is a biological robot. I hope you don't mind my taking that interesting attitude toward it. Nevertheless, its muscular-mechanical arrangements are not much different than those of an electronic doll, except that it is intensely destructible, and it is capable of a great deal of feeling, and it seems to be capable of independent thought and opinions.

I know the last time I had anything to do with a robot, I said, "All right. Now, let's walk through this fire here," and the robot did. And its legs got warm, and they cooled off, and that was that.

But the last time I said to a body, "All right. Now, you stand here, good and solid on this bridge, while we run in under the counter of this burning freighter," and the body said, "Aaahhhh, no, you don't!" And I said, "Yes, we do," you know, and it's - argument. So, we might say that the body is a biological robot capable of argument.

Now, in handling this, a thetan gets rather serious. He gets the idea, after a while, that this problem is serious. He's been trying to handle it for many, many generations. He's been miscuing and, he feels, misdirecting these biological robots, and he has found that the direction of them leaves a great deal to be desired.

He doesn't know all there is to know about this. Nobody ever gave him an instruction book. He took one over at birth sometime or another, picked one up, and he looked in vain for an instruction book on how you ran this thing. And he was quite sure that it did not have any opinion or goal different than his own or the physical universe. He was quite sure of that. The goals of this thing were quite similar to his own, and they were quite similar to the physical universe; this he was sure of.

And therefore, any error which he made was his fault. Any error which was made in his running of this biological robot became his fault. It didn't run right because somehow or another he wasn't good enough, or he wasn't bright enough. It was quite a puzzle to him.

Now, we do not, must not and cannot assume that every thetan in this universe, or in any universe, is dedicated totally to the receiving of motivators. We must not assume that, because it's not true. He could align himself with this, he could get into this frame of mind, he could adjust his considerations this way, but he doesn't necessarily do so.

And by and large, those thetans that you will run into and say hello to, in the largest majority, are not subscribing to anything like "I must pick up as many overt acts against myself as I can." They just aren't doing this, that's all.

They're saying, "I'd like to have a good time. I would like to know a few more people. I wonder what kind of a game we can make out of this," you know? "A lot of people need help. We'll help them." He's doing this, and he's doing that. And somehow or other, however, we find - at least on this planet, at this time - a great many who believe utterly that they're failing in some fashion and cannot exactly tell us how.

Nobody gave them an instruction book, you see? They took over this body, probably a Mark I barbarian-type, and juggled it around and tested out the levers and so forth, and it apparently worked. When they said, "Walk," it walked; when they said, "Stop," it stopped. When they said, "Eat," it ate. And you know, it worked all right; worked all right. But it kept going wrong somehow, you know. It just kept running off of the rails in some fashion. They would say, "All right. Now, this is a worthy cause. Attack that palisade you see here." And all of a sudden, it'd go collapse.

"I didn't tell it to go collapse, " the thetan says. "Now, what's the matter with it? There are plenty of bodies. They're being made all the time and so forth. And it seems to me that it'd be a better world to make another body into if we attacked this palisade and wiped this thing out. And so it gets nicked, so it gets clipped, so it gets knocked off. Well, it can always get another mock-up. This is not tough. This is not hard to do." And yet it didn't do that.

So, he says, "Well," (and this was his mistake) "the body is cowardly. It doesn't like to use itself as a backstop for cold steel. Well," it says, "therefore, I am driving this thing harder than its courage level will tolerate. So, the thing to do is just drive it a little less - high courage level, you know. Just let's not be quite so adventurous."

And having been a little bit less adventurous, then, in driving it, it said, "All right. Now, let's attack the boss's office," and the body goes, "N-a-a-a-a-a-h" collapse.

The thetan says, "Oh, I guess we'll just have to lower its courage level a little bit. We just can't expect that much of this body. There's something wrong in the way I'm handling it. I'm probably mocking up on this switchboard the wrong combination. Something is odd here."

And about this time, about this time - in any era, when he has dropped down below the point of "Soldier, attack the palisade" and then dropped down below the point of "Worker, attack the foreman and get a couple of grapotniks more pay" - when it's dropped down that low, why, the thetan begins to worry about himself, in any era. And we find him calling on the gods or doing strange and peculiar things - entering into unholy rights, such as going to the local spa and getting some chuckupnuk water or something to remedy this situation.

And some of them even have gone so far as to dip into philosophy in order to discover something about this. And this, you could see, would be likely to happen in any condition where nobody had ever furnished an instruction book.

You see, if you were trying to run a car without any instruction book and you'd never had any experience with another car, you'd be having some interesting experiences; but they wouldn't even compare to the experiences of handling a body. See, because the body had, evidently, another built-in mechanism which says, "I must have motivators. I must have things done wrong to me. I must be abused. I must be put in a position of sacrifice. I must be offered up to the gods in some way or another. I must have enough people mad at me so that 1, myself, can then continue to exist in a calm state. I must get killed in enough bizarre ways to make life justified" - all these peculiar things.

Here's a thetan running something, and as far as its reaction is concerned and all the reactive mechanisms in it are concerned, he believes that he must not tell it to walk through a live fire. And here is something that although it is protesting against walking through a live fire, it feels it absolutely must have a nice overt act, like a burn.

Witness: It walks through the fire. Does its legs heat up? Even if they're not badly corroded or burned, the burn will hang on for a long time; the burn will stay there for a long time. You mean this biological machine is incapable, with its many capabilities, of healing up a burn rapidly, of building up a certain amount of skin area?

That's not true. It is capable of doing these things. It can heal itself. You mean to tell me that if it breaks a bone, that it can't put the bone back together again? Well, all right. You take a robot. A robot can't put the bone back together again, either - a metal robot.

But if you take a bent leg on a metallic robot and straighten it up and solder it in place, there is no aftereffect; but if you do that with a biological robot, there is an aftereffect. It now has something called a psychosomatic illness. It can't have another broken leg, so it keeps the old one. Get the idea?

So, a thetan unaware of this, is - and believe me, you - right here in this generation, he was unaware of this. He's walking down the street one day, and he has a twinge. And he says, "What on earth is this?" And, "Well, I guess I've just been pushing this body too hard. It's my fault, again, in some fashion or another. I've been pushing the body too hard."

And he's got another twinge. And he goes home, and he's got arthritis. And he calls in a doctor, and the doctor looks it over and says, "Well, this is caused by this or that or something or other, and we must put it in mudpacks or do something with it. And you must lay it up here for another two or three weeks, and you'll get over it."

Maybe he does. But having gotten over that, he's out walking again - this time it's a bright, sunshiny day, not a rainy day like the other time - and he has a twinge. And nobody right here in our generation actually, positively knew that it was simply an old broken leg, you know. They didn't know that it was an old injury. There was a suspicion that it was an old injury.

Freud, with his theory of trauma, was doing some mighty fine speculating, very, very fine speculating; but remember, he was speculating. It was an oddity that the medical profession accepted the theory of trauma, that some kind of a psychic trauma could occur, and it was an oddity that psychosomatic illness could arrive and be established without ever any slightest proof of source.

This is the wildest buy of this century, by the way. Nobody could prove, trace or do anything to actually demonstrate that such a thing as an arthritic swelling was traceable to mental causes. People suspected this, but they accepted this thing called "psychosomatic illness" without proof. We came along; we have the proof that there is such a thing as psychosomatic illness.

But we look a little bit further than that, as we're just now doing, and we discover that it isn't an accidental stimulus-response, unintentional thing. We discover this great oddity: that so far from the body being really victimized by the fact that the broken leg recurs - that's the original trauma, the broken leg, which recurs as arthritis - so far from this, is the fact that the body doesn't ever want to give up that lovely broken leg. You see?

There is actually, evidently, not just a stimulus-response mechanism here, but an actual desire on the part of a body (which, of course, goes through many inversions, and so forth) to continue to have a broken leg. We won't worry about the number of reasons it can have a broken leg or how it justifies this. We can immediately arrive at forty or fifty ways of justifying the body's state of mind concerning a broken leg. You see, we can really do that.

We can say, "Well, a broken leg gets attention; it got sympathy. There were certain rewards for having a broken leg. The body didn't have to work; it could take it easy." We can do all these various justifications, and believe me, if you want to go over the whole list of them, there are probably fifty, sixty of them. They're good and solid, but they're only rationale. They are after this interesting fact: The body wanted a broken leg. The others are just "why a body wanted a broken leg," you understand. First and foremost, it wanted a broken leg.

So, here's a thetan, he decides that he'll have a good time. He'll have a couple of drinks of beer, and he'll go home now. And he takes his attention for one moment off this robot. He thinks he has its automatic pilot nicely set, you know. It's going to walk right on down the sidewalk. And he takes his attention off of it, and it steps off the curb and bumps into a truck.

And he says, "Isn't this careless of me." He's been taught, sort of, by the body to blame himself. The body never blames itself - never! Has never been known to blame itself about anything. It always has to blame the other guy. Doesn't operate like a thetan, then. Thetan can blame himself

He says, "Look what I did. I got careless." He doesn't even go so far as to say, "What a lousy automatic pilot this thing's got!"

If you were to take your directional control off of a biological robot anywhere in London, outside of the house and so forth, you wouldn't have any biological robot left, that's all. It'd be gone - squash! All right.

Now, if you had, you might say, a metallic robot or some chemical robot walking along and you set it to walk in a straight line, it wouldn't get any other ideas; it'd just walk in a straight line. Maybe it'd strike an unevenness of ground which would tip it over, but you could have seen that in advance. You'd say, "Look, there's an unevenness of ground down there. I'll set this thing to walk a little bit shorter with the right leg than the left leg when it hits that unevenness, and it'll get over that," see? In other words, you could predict the course of this metallic robot.

Oh, you set up a biological robot to walk over this course: You're lost in the woods, so you set the automatic pilot. You say, "This thing must have some homing instinct or another; even pigeons do that," and you set it to walk home. The next thing you know, you notice some curious footprints. You say, "There's somebody else lost in the woods." A little bit later you notice another set, and then you say, "Good lord, they're mine!"

Well, this, of course, makes you wrong. So, it looks like the body has, as part of this thirst for a motivator, an obsession to make something else or somebody else wrong. It looks like this is just a straight-out built-in mechanism. It doesn't have a good automatic pilot, but it certainly has a good make-you-wrong mechanism.

And when a thetan agrees too long and too hard with a body, he begins to pick this up too. He begins to look around for somebody else to blame. He gets tired of blaming himself; that was all he did for several generations, and now he's decided to blame something else for a change, he says. But he's actually learned the mechanism one way or the other, usually, from the body.

And when he does this, he's in too close in agreement with the body. And you, an auditor, come along and you start to process him. You say, "you" to him, and he thinks you're talking about and to him, a body. Got it?

So, this condition of "I am a body," is a state of beingness attained by thetans who have failed for too many generations to understand or run a biological robot, and that's just the totality of it. He just failed too long, too often, so he adopts other means of rationale. He says, "I am a body. I will die." He just adopts the philosophy of this thing, because it has been a champion, as far as he's concerned.

It was incomprehensible. Starting from a state of no instruction book, it arrives at a totality of bewilderment, as far as he's concerned. But the only bewildering factors in the mock-up - and I will put this very strongly to your attention: The only actually bewildering factors in it were, one, "Somebody else must be wrong; I can only receive injury."

Now, those two factors are completely bewildering to a thetan, because both of them say, "Don't get any job done, if you please. Don't get any job done." It says, "In order to correct the fortunes of Earth, we will have to attack Russia. Russia can be wrong; we can't be wrong. Therefore, there is no reason whatsoever to straighten out our own household; there is every reason to attack somebody else's household." Do you get the idea?

Which is the very germs of war. "We must always straighten out way over here someplace or go way over thataway in order to get anything done, because they're wrong; we're never wrong."

Now, if a fellow has a number of factors sitting right in front of him which are rather easy to adjust, and he never takes a moment to adjust these factors, he's going to get into an interesting condition. He's going to run into the wrongness of somebody else, but he's going to be tripped by the wrongness which is in front of his own face and in his own house. You get the idea?

It isn't necessarily true that he should correct everything that is wrong in his own house before he corrects somebody else. See, that's fallacy too. You can correct both of them at the same time. But don't become totally unaware of the fact that there might be some factors that need shifting around close to home.

With what wonderful aplomb can a nation adventure upon war, to correct some ideological eccentricity on the part of some other nation; itself, all the while, worshiping mud turtles. This is the kind of thing that a thetan will do, by the way, because there really isn't anything wrong with him, except maybe a little lack of understanding. Got the idea?

But a thetan is still capable of saying, "Boy, there's an awful lot of this machinery we're using right here that needs fixing, and it's a good game to go over and run into some of their machinery too." But that's the way a thetan would look at it. He could look at it rationally unless he's driven blindly by these impulses of "We're all perfect here, see, and therefore we're going to attack over there because over there is the only area that needs any straightening out," see? A thetan would be nuts if he did that, and a body is that crazy.

It says, "I'm perfect. They're wrong." At the same time, it is saying, "I can only receive injury and be put upon. My total goal is to be put upon or to receive injury." It's utterly mad. It is not a logical sequence. And an understanding of that, of course, does make it a logical sequence.

You can always understand an illogic. And there's where the body could lose 100 percent: You can understand an illogic. You can understand that something thinks that kiddies' blocks and tank cars are identical.

Now, you might at first protest against this, but you could say to yourself, "Well, I can understand how that thing believes that kiddies' blocks and tank cars are identical. I understand that it does so. It's not logical; it's illogical. It is stupid. But I can still see that it does so."

Therefore, you could say about your body, "I still understand that this body can never do anything like straightening itself out. It's always got to wrong or find wrong somebody or something else. Somebody and something else, you see, is the wrongness, and the only intention which the body can accept is, of course, injury to itself."

You can understand these two things as a modus operandi, but it certainly doesn't run like a thetan, does it? It looks like a big overt act on the part of somebody who mocked them up, see? It looks like a nice swindle, it looks like a nice problem of some kind or another.

It's an interesting problem right there, if you want to look at it as a problem, is how come they got built this way? Because if you were a thetan building something and you wanted to play a good, solid practical joke on somebody, you are actually not above giving them a gimmick which makes their switchboard short out every thirty-sixth hour of its operation; you're no above doing that. It's a good gimmick to do something like that, but you don't expect it to go on like that forever.

You expect that sooner or later they're going to find out that their switchboard is shorting out every thirty-sixth hour and then, having found it out, will find out you did it, and then realize they've been had. Otherwise, there's no cream to the jest, you see? There's no reason to do anything unless somebody is going to discover it sooner or later.

And I don't think that the biological robot's mechanism of motivator hunger was ever intended to be discovered. I don't think so, for the good reason that - I've been working on this problem for a quarter of a century, and during the last five years a lot of you good chaps have been working on this problem right along with me, too. And it wasn't until very recent - we even had the principle of the overt act-motivator sequence. We knew that if you did something to somebody, you expect it back. The body doesn't do that. It is simply motivator hungry. And to do an overt act is unthinkably horrible, see?

Well now, maybe you could justify this, but only on the basis of complete distrust of every life form that ever lived. You could say therefore there is no such thing as an ethic or moral principle or factor anywhere in the world or anywhere in the universe. You could say that no life form is capable of an ethical act.

If you believed that badly, you could rig up a mock-up to keep him in line, but listen, that mock-up wouldn't keep him in line. It'd make him a criminal. So, the goal of it isn't justified, either. So, we look in vain for a good reason for this condition to happen with regard to this biological mock-up.

If it were a practical joke, it would have been discovered a long time since. If it were done to make you moral, ethical and fall into line, there are just too many other ways of going about it which are rather practical. You don't put every doll you have out of action in order to have a well-arranged and obedient horde of dolls. You don't knock them all flat, you know.

So, we could wander around at great length in the midst of a logical labyrinth of contradictions to say, "How did the body get this way?" We could say, "Well, it got hit and hit until it finally developed a thirst for being hit."

Oh, now wait a minute. That's fine. That's good. That's one of my explanations, real good; it's real sharp. I thought of it myself. But you'd have to have a patterned consideration in order to make that happen, you see? You'd have to consider that this was going to happen before the condition would happen. So again, it's not a logical sequence of events but is an expected sequence of events.

One would have to say, "This mock-up, after it's been hit so often, will develop a thirst for being hit." Ah, that's no good. You mean, the thing's going to develop such a thirst for being hit, it'll gradually vanish.

All right. Let's get over into something very new and very sharp and very practical -Axiom 55. Do you want to hear a little bit about Axiom 55, hm?

Audience: Yeah.

All right. Axiom 55 could be stated with very scholarly words. It could probably be stated with great length and unctuousness. But the fact of the matter is, Axiom 55's sense is as follows: Any cycle of action is a consideration. Any cycle of action is a consideration. It's not an inevitability.

The cycle of action of this universe, which is create, survive, destroy, is a consideration and does not necessarily hold true, is not necessarily true for any part of this universe at any given instant, but is simply a consideration.

It's interesting because it wipes out what was to be Six Levels of Processing, Issue 6. Now, you're sitting here looking at Issue 7, you wonder what happened to Issue 6. I'm always doing that to somebody. But the goal and modus operandi of Issue 6 was stated; it was stated very clearly. It was stated in just so many words in a recent Operational Bulletin, which is circulated to HAS staffs from my office.

You're not missing anything. It's mostly gossip and my general bad temper. I have to make everybody think I'm good tempered, you know, and a nice chap; but it gets to be a strain after a while, because I'm not, you know. And so, I at least issue these Operational Bulletins, with all these catty remarks and so forth that I dam up, to the staff.

And anyway, the Six Levels of Processing, Issue 6 was advertised in this Operational Bulletin to be something which put the stress on create so as to get the chap over to the earliest portion of the cycle of action. And that was fine. And so, I then proceeded to make a series of tests and investigations concerning the exact processes which would do this. And I found out they were just fine, and I found out they were all limited.

And I said, "What is this?" see? Wow. They're just fine, and they're all limited. They run just so far, they improve just so far, and then they cave in. Why?

Looked it over closely and found out that the second you ran out the consideration or tampered or monkeyed up the consideration of "create, survive, destroy" by running "create, create, create," you were no longer taking the fellow to the first part of the curve; you might be taking him to the end of the curve. You get the idea? You might be finishing up his time for him as well as starting it, you see?

So therefore, they just ran just long enough to unsettle the agreement of the cycle of action. And without his cognition of the fact that this agreement had been unsettled, we then discovered the unworkability of a cycle of action. It's quite interesting.

So, I looked this over a little closer and got a little smarter and realized where I had first heard of the cycle of action. It's Vedic hymn number 4, "Hymn to the Dawn Child," the oldest piece of writing man has any record of. And it says that all things follow this curve. It isn't very flowery language, but it says they get born, and they grow, and they - so on, and they finally kick off.

But that's about the earliest piece of stuff that man has. It was traditional for thousands of years before it was written down; and having been written down, it's still the oldest piece of writing he has. See, that's pretty ancient.

So, I became suspicious. It looked to me like anything that would survive that long would be the least admired thing around. It's using our old law of "Those things which are least admired persist."

And then I looked over a chap by the name of J.C. and realized that there's a rather large organization dedicated to having us believe that a fellow was born, lived a life of the greatest piety and service, and was then crucified like a miserable criminal and then was born again. And this sure looked to me like a cycle of action, advertised. It looked to me like an advertisement much better done than the Bovril advertisements, over a long period of time.

Here you had a chap stuck on a cross, like a common criminal, that people were supposed to worship. Do you know that Christianity was at once - one time was actually booted out of an Eastern nation because the head of that nation could not understand why anyone would want to take its headman and disgrace him to that degree? And he got such a poor opinion of anybody who would display his headman on a cross with spikes in him that he disallowed Christianity throughout the whole of his kingdom and wouldn't let anybody come in or talk about it anymore, because he said it must be awfully degraded.

Well, knowing these little odds and ends and these little items and having some good idea that we might not be dealing with the purest of the pure - this has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or whether he really lived or anything of the sort; but it does have to do with the fact that we have an advertised cycle of action for the last two thousand years of "He came to grief by being a good man," you know?

"He was born, he survived for a while, and in spite of all that power, they still did him in. And of course, that will happen to you, too. Ha! You know, that will happen to you, too. It doesn't matter how good you are, how much good you do, or anything else."

And then we get this chap:

"The boast of heraldry, and the pomp of pow'r, / And all the beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, / Await alike the coming of the hour: / And paths of glory lead but to the grave." (Part of a poem entitled "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," written by English poet Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771).)

Cheerful little piece, you know? Looks to me like this is a swindle. Does seem to me that it is, because it doesn't hold true.

There are numerous incidents in this universe, in terms of absolute mechanical, chemical things, where this principle of "create, survive, destroy" does not hold true - just doesn't hold true.

Take the cycle of matter. Matter is quite interesting. It comes from a sort of a radioactive point, which is hardly a creation; it's a nothingness. And then we seem to get some matter in a radioactive form. And then as it exhausts itself, we fall into a solid. Doesn't look like decay at all. It looks like survive is on the end of the cycle. No decay occurs.

As far as the radioactive material is concerned, there's some decay with it, and as long as we take a partiality to one item that we're studying and saying, "radioactive material," we can see something vaguely similar to a cycle of action there. But if we look at the actual energy of this radioactive material, we find out it sets itself up and survives and then goes on and creates things. Isn't that cute? I mean, there's something wrong.

You have to think it over. And don't worry too much about thinking it over, because there isn't any real cycle of action there, anyhow. So, the whole thing gets kind of slippery under your hands.

We can then consider, and with ease we can consider this, since it is our earliest consideration and one which is with us all the time, because it is the fundamental of the biological robot. You got that, now? A thetan doesn't believe this. He couldn't possibly believe this 100 percent because it's not workable.

You mean to say that after he studies how to become a bricklayer, age in and age out, he will eventually decay? No, he'll be a good bricklayer.

Yeah, but you say, "Then if he lays bricks for a while, he'll decay." Why? He run out of bricks or something? He can determine that he's now tired of bricklaying and do something else, or he can become a master bricklayer, or he can do other things with regard to bricklaying, but it's not necessarily true that everything he picks up is going to bring him to destruction.

And that is what the cycle of action seeks to teach you: that anything you pick up or anything you do will bring you to destruction; that if you begin to write, you'll go stale in two or three years, and that will be the end of your writing career.

You understand that? That if you join a circus and become a performer, after a while, you will come to grief. Your tightrope will snap. Not necessarily true at all. It might snap and you might land in the net and build a better tightrope.

But it is laid in as an almost unarguable fact in these biological mock-ups. They are born, they grow, they decay, they die. And boy, we just watch that cycle, and we watch that cycle, till the best thing we know, as we see John Jones walk down the street, is someday we're going to bury him. That's the best thing we know about John Jones.

We see a little boy, we know that he'll grow up. Of course, in this Atomic Age, we don't know that as clearly anymore. But we see him, and we know he's going to grow up and he'll get married, and then he'll slop off and he'll die.

Why? Why? We know that a mammal grows one-sixth of its total life. That's another law that comes out of all this. It's quite interesting. Nearly all mammals except man grows one-sixth of its normal life span. It's an interesting law. For instance, if you grew for ten years, you would live to the age of sixty. That is one of the little laws that comes out of this.

It applies to every mammal but man; it doesn't apply to man. Man grows for eighteen years and lives to be' seventy. But it goes - it even applies to sharks and elephants and snakes and all kinds of bric-a-brac, so that we have here an interesting thing. We have, with the animal kingdom, we seem to have a certain law of growth and death.

And we say, "Well, this is a good thing because the whole world would be populated by sharks if sharks didn't die sooner or later." Oh, I don't know that it would be. How about getting a cycle of action for sharks that they were born and created in full maturity and then dwindled gradually away, you see, to birth, and then disappeared. You don't have to have them destroyed; you could have them becoming more and more active and younger and younger.

Now, it takes a little consideration, rather than persuasion from me, to look over and discover the falsity of the cycle of action. There's no reason why you, right at this moment, could not advance in time up to the age of twenty-one years and look it and then stay there. No reason why you couldn't do thatexcept the consideration that "All things are born and survive and then die."

And if you're sold on that one, as a thetan, and if your body continues to be sold on that one all the way along, of course, it will be true. But Axiom 55, a cycle of action - any cycle of action is only a consideration. And you start fooling around with this, and it gets quite interesting as you find out that there are an - infinite numbers of cycle of action. They can do the darnedest things, and they don't necessarily have to follow this body curve.

So, there was another little gimmick to know about this biological mockup that should have been in an instruction book you should have been issued. It should have said, "Mark I Barbarian is furnished with a series of beliefs of which this is one: that there exists such a thing as a cycle of action, and that anything which is born will then grow, and anything which grows will then decay and anything which decays will then die.

"And this is an installed mechanism, which you find just two centimeters south-southeast of the medulla oblongata. And this is installed so as to keep the Malthus theory from working out; but in times of stress, when you are losing your husband, it is two centimeters south-southeast of the medulla oblongata. And the age scale on the cycle of action can be reset to sixteen."

See, that's different - different sort of thing. That would be the sort of thing if somebody had played this fair. They issue you a mock-up, and then they don't tell you how it works. Well, you don't even know who issued you the mock-up. That's the least its instruction book should say, "Made by the War Ministry First Roman Legion," something of the sort, "Issue: Speed: 130 paces to the minute."

Well, when something defeats you as often as a body, in that you have certain goals and predictions, and then you're unable to reach them, you begin to get superstitious after a while because logical has failed; and religion and all sorts of other things start to enter in. That's the long and short of it. You begin to consult the gods because you didn't have an instruction book. Somebody has to know.

And this has nothing to do with the fact there may or may not be gods. There are gods; there are plenty of them around, but I don't think they're watching the sparrows fall. I think that was another piece of propaganda.

Now, here we have a condition where an individual is defeated. And so, yes, he's defeated because he does not predict well. He says, "I am not predicting well."

He said, "This mock-up is going to walk from point A to point C and is going to arrive at point C." Biological mock-up doesn't do that. It starts at A, and unless it is readjusted, guided, and predicted with every step, it doesn't arrive at C. It arrives over here at point X, see? X marks the spot where the body was found.

You set it up to go in any particular direction. You say, "Now, I'm going to teach this whole thing how to lay bricks," and it winds up to be a very, very fine ditch digger; somehow or other can't lay bricks. You don't know why, but it just can't seem to lay bricks. You know how to lay bricks, and it just doesn't lay bricks, that's all.

You say, "Well, I'm going to teach this thing to become a piano player. Fine. We're going to play the piano. Everything is going to be fine. And we're going to run along and it's going to be a good piano player." And it goes just so long, and it ceases to be a piano player. You invest seven, eight, ten years at the piano, and at the end of that time you're a complete failure. And you say, "What on earth is this all about? I mean, naturally, the more I practice on the piano and the more used I get to playing a piano, the better piano player I'd be," but it doesn't work that way with a body, because a body is following a cycle of action.

You create a new skill, the skill will grow for a while, then it will decay, and then you can't play the piano anymore. Well, this is a wild thing to have happen. You mean, the mock-up has got a say in this whole thing? Well, that's all right. It's perfectly all right for another mock-up to have a say in the whole thing, as long as you're a mock-up; but you're not a mock-up.

You try to use a body along a certain ethical pattern, you try to get it into good shape, you try to straighten it up and make it survive and live and somehow or other carry on and be a credit to all hands, and when you finally get up, why, somebody drops it in a box and pats it in the face with a spade. Doesn't seem to be much of a reward for all your activity.

And this seems to be the inevitable fact. This is something from which you can't escape. This is it. Well, it looks to me like it's a strange and peculiar little rat race a guy gets into. That's the way it's going to be; that's the way it is.

Well, I don't know any reason at all why it should be that way at all because, in the first place, I have occasionally looked at some kind of a machine that was very difficult to run. I remember a monocycle - you know, monocycles are quite interesting. Did you ever try to run a monocycle? Just one wheel and a crossbar across the top of it, and it has a couple of pedals like a tricycle, you know. And if you balance the pedals just right, this monocycle will stand up on one wheel, and you sit up there and go round and round in circles and so forth.

I took a look at this monocycle and got up on the top of it and ran it round and round in circles and stopped and stepped down off of it. Fellow came in and said, "What are you doing? It takes a long time to learn how to run one of those."

And I said, "Oh, it does?" and got on the monocycle again and fell flat on my face. Now, something had believed him.

Now, we at least, a few years ago, rooted up this idea of the cycle of action. We brought it into view and said, "This is a very, very important principle." Latterly, during the days of Scientology, we have still said, "That's quite an important principle, that 'create, survive, destroy."' And as long as we were laying our bricks, you might say, in a good solid agreement with mock-ups and we weren't pushing them around too hard and we weren't trying any wild stunts, this is true; the cycle of action stayed there, and so on.

But the second that we really started to use modern techniques and include with those modern techniques that the cycle of action was a fact, not just a consideration, we found out the cycle of action didn't hold - didn't hold.

You get a guy - create, create, create, create, and at first he starts to wind up, you know, earlier; and at first he does all right, and he finds his position and tone change, and then all of a sudden, he'll do a skid, and he's liable to wind up anyplace.

What he does, actually, is run out the fact that "create" is at the beginning of the cycle of action. See, he just runs this out. And this leaves him adrift, without any understanding, somewhere on a cycle of action he has himself not determined. In other words, the cycle of action itself can be run out.

Now, it's an interesting thing that if the cycle of action were not a consideration, the most horrible, grimmest thing that you could imagine would be laid in your laps. If it were actually an unalterable fact, if it were actually native to the beingness of a thetan, you would have to confront something pretty grim, and this grim thing would be this: That anytime you tried to make anything better, you would regret it.

Now, if you look that over carefully, you will see how it works. You try to make something better, you will follow a cycle of action with it; and the end of the cycle of action is destroy. So, you are trying to run only part of the cycle of action. But the actuality is you don't start to make something better until it's well decayed. It needs repair. So, now you're trying to turn the cycle of action backwards, and running backwards in time is regret. The definition of regret is to return something through time, to run time backwards.

If you ask somebody to do this, by the way, just as an exercise - to run an engram backwards a couple of times - he'll start regretting it. The emotion of regret is a run backwards.

So, the cycle of action, if it were true, would cause you to regret every bettering action which you took. You would be inevitably dedicated to crucifixion by trying to better the human race.

In other words, they've even blocked that lowest-level step "Who can you help?" If the cycle of action is true, you can't better anything or anybody without winding up sacrificed yourself. And that chap they've got impaled on the cross is an advertisement of this which says, "You'd better not improve the human race. You'd better not do anything about this." It's the warning, like the big sign on the empty dog kennel which says, "Ferocious dog. Beware." Only there's no dog in the kennel, except this one thing: cycle of action.

Isn't that fascinating? It tells us that we'd better not help anybody. Well, you can look back over it, you can prove this to yourself. You know there's some chap that you've tried to help, and you sure regretted it.

Well, the whole race is getting a better and better agreement on this. If nobody is going to better anything anywhere, I ask you, if you please, how is it ever going to wind up in anything but "destroy"?

That is the surest way in the world, then, to confirm the cycle of action. That is the surest way in the world to keep everybody convinced that the cycle of action exists - is to let nobody help anything. If you help anything, you'll be destroyed, of course. You'll regret it; that's the least that will happen to you. But just the forward motion of time, all by itself, does not carry with it the cycle of action.

By the way, just an understanding of this, just a good grip on this, just looking over how it might be arranged otherwise, just looking over the factors involved in it, just finding an example or two where it doesn't hold true, and all of a sudden you become free, just to that degree; you become much freer. Because it tells you, "Look, you can make yourself better, you can make anybody else better, and there's no slightest incursion of karma as a result thereof"

It doesn't matter who you help. You can help people. You can make things better. You can repair a car, if you want to; it will be a better car. It won't just destroy you.

Now, it's an odd thing for a self-enforcive mechanism of this character to be built into this biological mock-up. I'd say that it had more to do with philosophy than good, solid biology or electronics. And I think somebody was stretching a point.

I wouldn't build a robot like that if I were that. If I were building some robots, I'd like to have some robots that were good robots that would be active and operative. I wouldn't build a line of operating robots which would build new robots, you know, and wipe out the old robots and then fix it up so that anytime you tried to repair a robot, you'd wind up wrecked, see? I wouldn't fix it up that way.

I'd be a better craftsman. I'd have more respect for myself and what I was making. I don't mean that as any snide comment, but I just do have ideas on this line. I have ideas of what is ethical and what isn't ethical. I wouldn't build a chain of robots that would eventually wind up to be lousy robots that would just get worse and worse as robots, you know; that issue by issue, from Mark I to Mark X to the nth, would just get worse.

Wouldn't do that, unless I wanted to get even with somebody, or unless I myself were afraid of all life forms, or unless I were doing something odd or peculiar that I wouldn't do. Or unless I were just playing a joke.

Now, you could have your own speculations concerning this of just why you'd go about this or what you'd do about this, and it's an interesting philosophical field; but all the philosophy about it, again, is just the why. It's the rationale on the fact. The fact is there.

Now, I don't know how many of you have had anybody mock up something and then have it - various parts of that mock-up - be considered by him a threat to the body. I don't know how many of you have done this or how many of you have run anything vaguely resembling problems. But if you run these, the principles about which I am talking to you are very easily demonstrated. These are some of the easiest principles to demonstrate.

It is obvious that you do not want to be eaten by tigers, that you do not want your body to be eaten by tigers, right? In fact, you don't want to have anything to do with tigers. If a tiger came walking in the room this moment licking his chops, you would say, "Well, let's see, where can I put this mock-up? How flat can I press it against the ceiling?"

Now, the mock-up, however, doesn't think that way. It actually has an impulse in it which would say, "Aahh, tiger. Dine well, tiger. Have another arm." And you've gotten this in dream states when you were a kid. A terrific danger shows up, and you're not able to run from it; you just stand there. That is the body's action. The body either stands there or walks into the menace.

Now, the proof of this is the reactions on this basis, the reactions are quite interesting. And you have somebody mock up a ravenous tiger, and then have him get the idea that that tiger and the ground the tiger is standing on is totally there as a threat and menace to the mock-up, and the distance between the tiger and the mock-up goes slurp - no distance. There is a hunger in the mock-up to be in the tiger and to have the tiger in the mock-up. Quite interesting. There is a starvation for distance closure. Wow!

Now, this is compounded additionally by having this fact: If you ran the process "Invent a specific problem a tiger could be to you," you would find the body just going, "Slurp. Oh, boy. Oh, luscious. Mmm, lovely."

Well, now, you want to keep the mock-up on the road and keep things squared around and keep life running. Well, you're not going to keep life running being hungry for being eaten by tigers, see. So, you don't want tigers to dine; and the body would just love to have a tiger dine.

Have you ever run an eating engram off of the track somewhere? Have you ever run an old past-life genetic-line eating engram and gotten the point where "Oh, boy. Now I'm really serving. I'm being eaten," you know. "Lovely, lovely, lovely on being all et up. Isn't that gorgeous." I don't think you feel that way.

Well, something feels that way, and it's the biological robot. It says, "Oh, boy, being et up. Oh, fine. Tigers. Oh, wonderful. Look at the truck coming in over the top of me. Ha! That'll squash me in a couple of seconds. Lovely!"

Did you ever see such an avidity to quit in your life? Now, you wonder why somebody didn't issue you an instruction book. I think it would have been all very well. I think, to many a thetan, you could have issued a very specific instruction book and the thetan could have read it from beginning to end, and he never would have believed any part of it. It's too incredible.

But we have to take these things into account if we're going to separate a thetan from one of these biological robots or get one of these biological robots straightened out. Number one, you do not have to assume that a biological robot will always inevitably follow a cycle of action. This is not necessary to assume that at all. You can change considerations concerning that. You can get the biological robot in much better shape by getting it capable of receiving orders of any kind or being willing to give orders of any kind. You can practically civilize one by running processes of this kind. You can get these vacuums and weak universes and starvation mechanisms eradicated by running problems of one kind or another. You can do things with this biological robot today in Scientology that you couldn't do before.

I don't guarantee that you will make it a perfect robot. I, myself, if I were going to get a perfect robot, would go up to Marcab or someplace and pay a few grabutniks into the factory and get a nice mechanical robot issued. You know, one that had an automatic pilot, and when you said, "Walk from point A to C," it would arrive at C. It's possible to play a game with such a robot.

It's also, to some degree, possible to play a game with one of these biological robots - to some degree - if they're straightened out. But I don't know how anybody could play a game with one, actually, unless he himself had a good command of the exact modus operandi on which it was working, which is, give it a chance to fail, and it'll fail. Give it a chance to get injured, and it'll get injured. At the least propitious moment, it gets sick. It does anything illogical it can think of, evidently, to defeat the purposes of the game.

These are not thinkingnesses; they are simply considerations built into a mass, just like the command "I am a wall" is that wall. You get the idea? That wall is a wall. It is a wall because it is a solid command which says, "a wall." It also says, "I am solid," and "I'm enduring." Now, when you want to see that wall, you have to be willing and able to receive the order "I am a wall" or the statement "I am a wall" in order to see the wall. You see that.

Now, if you have a biological mock-up that says, "I am sweetness and light, and I mean to serve you to the end of your days," but which is actually cutting your theta throat from one end to the other, it simply has a number of commands of this character built into it, and that is to say, "Injury is better than anything we know about." Sounds horrible, doesn't it? "The cycle of action is an inevitable fact." It has enormous numbers of concepts built into it. They are not thinkingnesses any more than that wall is a thinkingness, and yet the biological robot will function within this realm of action. And therefore, if you knew the realm in which it was functioning, and you knew the limits in which it was functioning, you would then not be very surprised, so as to be thrown out of order with regard to your own prediction, when it didn't quite go the way you intended it to go.

If you had an instruction book, it would cease to have power over you to the extent that any failure on its part became a failure on your part. Do you see that?

Audience: Mm-hm.

And an understanding of this, all by itself, would serve to assist you, a thetan, to be much freer than you ever were before.

Thank you.

Male voice: Thank you.